[gentoo-desktop] Re: Gnome woes!

[Duncan]

Lindsay Haisley <fmouse-gentoo@×××.com> posted
20060719014212.GD23572@×××.com, excerpted below, on  Tue, 18 Jul 2006
20:42:12 -0500:

> Thus spake Donnie Berkholz on Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 08:18:00PM CDT
>> Lindsay Haisley wrote:
>> > Donnie, anyone with some Gnome experience, know how to get out of this
>> > one?
>>
>> It has never happened to me, everything always works great for me.
>> That's why I am a dev, weird local issues don't happen. =)

Yeah, we know, become a dev and all the weird issues happen to someone
/else/ and aren't reproducible on a dev's system!  =8^)

> Oh well.  I guess I'm just going to have to bite the bullet, blow away
> my old gnome config altogether, and rebuild it from scratch.  That
> generally gets the job done.

I'm not a GNOME user (I /vastly/ prefer the configurability of KDE, which
actually treats me as if I have some intelligence in the choices it
offers, but that's just me), but regardless of the DE one chooses, I
always shudder when I see someone talking about blowing away hours worth
of configuration and customization.

First, When I upgrade KDE between minor versions (as 3.4 to 3.5, but not
always 3.5.2 to 3.5.3), I always take a copy of my user's KDE config tree
before the first time I launch the new version, just in case.

After starting the new version, there's usually a couple things that don't
work quite right, very frequently including kicker (the KDE panel app),
since as with you, mine is very highly customized.  However, that's NO
reason to blow away the ENTIRE config, hours and hours worth of
customization!

Instead, I delete the config (which is backed up, remember) and try again
just to be sure that it's the config at fault, not the apps themselves. 
Assuming that works, as generally does, I restore roughly half the config,
or half the config subdirs, anyway, and try again.  If that works, I know
it's in the other half.  If not, I know it's in the half I restored.  Then
I take the bad half and delete or restore half of it, and try again.  Soon
I'm down to a single culprit directory, so I advance to it, using half of
its contents, try again, then half of the bad half, again, etc, until I'm
down to a single subdir or a single file once again.  Repeat until it's a
single file.

When I reach the single file stage, there's a choice.  I can either blow
away that single file and recreate the config within, or I can continue
the same strategy, but within the file, working with sections at a time,
then lines at a time.  Personally, I almost always choose to resolve the
issue as far as possible, just because I'm curious what the problem is and
I like to find it and if possible get myself a satisfying explanation of
why it occurred or what changed.  However, those with less patience or who
don't understand enough of the details to make sense of individual
sections or lines in the first place will probably find it's better just
to blow away the file and reconfigure what it controlled, no more.

Now, the first time you do this it may take nearly as much time as simply
reconfiguring from scratch.  However, after a couple times, you'll begin
to understand the logic of how things are laid out, and will be able to
predict with some accuracy where the problem is, much of the time, and at
least choose the culprit subdir and possibly the culprit file the first
time, or if not that, narrow it down to a couple likely candidates out of
the many.  Thus, by the third time you do this, it's likely to take far
less time than it did the first time, or than it would to reconfigure
everything from scratch.  As a bonus, you develop a far greater
understanding of how the configuration system works and therefore can be
much more of a power user not only in troubleshooting terms, but also in
understanding how the configuration works and making the most of it for
your personal method of working.

It has been a very long time since I had to start a reconfigure from
scratch.  In fact, I believe it was several years before I jumped from
MSWormOS (where even when I did a reinstall, I had *.reg files saved up
for many of my customizations, and batch files to run for many of the
piddly applet installs) -- I've /never/ had to start a reconfigure from
scratch since I switched to Linux.  I've certainly saved many hours of
reconfiguration over that time, upgrading as I have from KDE 2.1 IIRC, all
the way thru the KDE 3.5 series, and switching from Mandrake to Gentoo. 
The same thing of course applies to much of the system configuration in
/etc, and I have quite a collection of sysadmin scripts in /usr/local that
I've created over the years, and retain thru the various upgrades as my
system evolves and changes.  (FWIW, /usr/local is a separate partition,
with a mirror image partition kept for backup, which I update from time to
time as well.  Of course, the same goes for /home, and for / with its /etc
as well, I have mirror images of all of them, for backup and emergency
boot purposes.)

So anyway, there's no reason why you should need to blow away your entire
GNOME config just to fix a problem with the panels.  The problem can
almost certainly be traced to an individual file, and even to and
individual section or sections and an individual line or lines within that
file.  Why blow away configuration for all sorts of /other/ stuff, when
doing so isn't required to fix the problem?  I've never understood the
thought process of those who do that, because if they can figure out where
the config is to blow it away, what's stopping them from figuring out
which part of the config is the problem, and blowing only it away, sparing
everything else?  Nothing is, except possibly that they've never thought
it thru, or a simple lack of patience, which would seem counterproductive
if the alternative is hours of recustomization time!



-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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